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Day: December 8, 2008

It’s not every day you get access to a plant in China that makes something inside your computer or game console or car. A few weeks back we visited Seagate’s Wuxi plant which makes more than a million hard drives every week. Employs more than 10,000 people.

Seagate has been my partner for several years now and sponsors my show, which is why I was the first American blogger to get access to this plant. Obviously I appreciate everything Seagate does for me and social media (they are playing around with FriendFeed and Facebook, their FriendFeed room is here).

This is also my 100th video. Thanks to Rocky Barbanica for his role in producing and editing these videos. Greatly appreciate that too.

Seagate is a dream client. They rarely ask me to do anything. They’ve never forced me to put interruptive advertising up or asked for anything that was anti community or viewer. That’s HUGE in this world and I hope that they continue to drive down the price of storage the way they have for about 30 years.

Thanks and hope you enjoy getting this look inside the factory in Wuxi, China.

Dave Winer talks about why FriendFeed hasn’t gotten super popular yet. He thinks there’s space for a new service between Twitter and FriendFeed. Everyone knows I’m FriendFeed’s #1 customer, but I’ve been studying the two services for a while and have found 10 reasons why FriendFeed isn’t right for you.

1. Twitter has one way to get content into the system. You see a box. You type. You push a button that says “update.” Compare this to FriendFeed. Let’s try to count the ways you can get content into the system.

a. the standard way on the top of the page, but there you have to choose whether you are putting in a message, a link, a photo.

b. Import your site. Or your Flickr. Or your YouTube. Or your Facebook. Or your Twitter stream. Or your blog. Or your Disqus comments. Or your Upcoming.org stream. Etc. Etc. There are 59 services that can be brought into FriendFeed. Very few services do the same for Twitter.

c. You can “Like” an item. Here’s all my likes. There’s 11,500 of them so far, which shows another problem: too much content to go through on FF. Twitter actually has a similar feature, called Favorites, but no one actually uses that.

d. You can “Comment” on an item. Here’s my comments. More than 6,000 of them. You really don’t want that kind of distraction. You might have to participate and that wouldn’t be good.

I’m probably missing five other ways you can get content into FriendFeed. Like emailing in items.

2. Twitter has one display of messages that are 140 characters long. You can’t handle the responsibility of longer messages. Plus FriendFeed’s messages include photos. YouTube videos. Play inline audio links. And more. You can’t handle those distractions. Twitter is for you.

4. On Twitter you follow people by your friends telling you their Twitter address. Mine is http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer or you will see someone replying to me by using @scobleizer and you’ll click that link and then click “follow.” FriendFeed has a whole list of recommended users that you’ll need to consider when first signing up for the service. The recommendations, if you’ve followed me, will include such people like Mike Arrington, Charlene Li, Corvida, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, David Sifry, and many other people. Now you’ll need to consider how those people got recommended to you and that might hurt your brain. On Twitter it just shows you who I’m following on the right side of the page — members who’ve been on longer are on top of that list.

7. FriendFeed has rooms. Twitter doesn’t. Rooms seem a lot like old-school mailing lists. Makes your head hurt, so they can’t be a good thing.

8. If you don’t want to see someone on Twitter anymore, you unfollow them. If you don’t want them to see you either, you block them. But that’s about it. FriendFeed does both of those but then also lets you hide posts. Did you know you can hide just someone’s Flickr photos? Or her Tweets? Or both? Too confusing. You can’t handle that, which is why Twitter is for you. Any service that has a tutorial on how to use a feature is just not for you.